Ingest Service

This service is addressed to

administrative units which have to deliver their records to an archive (National Archive, State Archive) in specific formats and structures and are looking for support with the process of data preparation

public and private archives which do not (yet) have their own ingest process and wish to externalise the SIP-creation

public and private archives with specific requirements, i.e. the transfer of records of unknown formats and structures or the post-processing of digital files (optical character recognition (OCR), creation of previews for web publication).

<p>We prepare your data and metadata for their direct transfer into a digital archive or their storage on an archive server. Our service includes data transfer, data migration into suitable archival formats (if necessary), archival description, extraction of technical metadata, and finally the packaging into a standardised format (SIP, may that be Matterhorn METS or eCH-0160). You stand to benefit from our long-term experience and our technical knowledge in the field of ingest and pre-ingest as well as from our archive-specific know-how which is indispensable for this specific task. Our approach is as follows:</p>

In a preliminary discussion source formats and structures of records as well as their target formats are determined. If necessary, we test all processes in a pilot project and deliver the results for your review. Especially with complex data structures, a pilot project is necessary to calculate the effort for the SIP-creation and the archival data analysis.

You can provide us with data and metadata from different source systems, be that from digitization projects, file systems, RM and GEVER systems (CMI Konsul, OpenText Case Management, Sharepoint) and other special applications and database systems.

We handle the data with the help of our ingest process Documill. After consulting you, we conduct several testing stages and migrate the data into suitable archive files (PDF/A, Tiff, Jpeg2000, Wave etc.) Other services, such as optical character recognition (OCR) or the creation of additional previews for the web presentation, can be integrated.

We catalogue digital records and paper records identically. If available we use describing metadata from source systems which is generally possible with RM and GEVER systems. The describing metadata is either directly embedded into the SIP, provided in EAD format or another import format suitable for your archive information system.

We develop your SIP target format according to the standard indicated by you. Normally we deliver SIP in the Matterhorn METS format or the transfer format eCH-0160.

We return the (yet again encrypted) archive information packets to you. You feed the data to your digital archive, transfer it to the archive’s server or deliver it to the respective archive. As soon as this step has been carried out, we delete our security backup.